Tucked behind the butt of his M4 rifle, Ford kept shooting.
Then he heard a snap, and the rifle fell from his left hand and dangled in front of him, clipped to his body armor by a carabiner. His left arm, his dominant hand, started to sting. The pain wasn’t tremendous. Kind of like that numb feeling when you hit metal with a sledgehammer. Ford looked down and tried to lift his arm up and couldn’t. His triceps was hanging off his arm. He had been shot.
That sucks, he thought. It was probably that damn sniper.
Sliding down against the wall, he pressed his helmet against the rock face in pain. Blood was starting to squirt onto the wall. I am going to bleed out and die if I don’t find the artery.
Grabbing at the wound, he tried to put pressure on it. The left side of his uniform was soaked in blood.
“Break your artery,” Shurer yelled from the other side of the ledge.
Sliding his thumb under his arm, he found the slippery, blood-soaked artery and pressed it against his body. The bleeding stopped immediately. Stunned by the wound, he stayed against the wall for a few minutes to collect himself.
“Fuck,” he said.
Sanders, shooting nearby, saw the wound.
“Hey, man. You’re going to be okay,” he screamed.
Ford looked down at his torn triceps. The muscle looked like a piece of rare steak.
“Bullshit, I’m fucked,” he said.
“We need to get the fuck off this mountain,” Walding shouted.
Ford was demoralized. Tired. The bullet had knocked some of the fight out of him. Pressed against the side of the cliff, he thought about life. For the first time in a long while, he thought of his family. His daughter and his girlfriend. Thoughts that had never crossed his mind during a fight in the past. For a few minutes, he felt mortal. He didn’t think he would die. But he knew he was hurt badly.
Stealing a glance back at the ledge, he saw that the team wasn’t doing well. There were four guys down. Ford knew they had to get off the ledge or die there. Forcing the emotions down, he took a few deep breaths before standing up.
“Hey, we need to get the fuck down there. We need to start getting this shit set up,” he said.
Ford knew they had been in the same spot a long time. Too long, and with every minute the insurgents were getting closer. Shurer was taking too long packaging the wounded to move, and Walton was consumed by working on air strikes. At this point, all Ford was concerned about was survivability.
But first, he needed to stop the bleeding. His team’s standard operating procedure was to centerline their tourniquet by rubber-banding it to the front of their body armor instead of in a pack on the side of their kit. That way, they could use it with either arm. But Ford couldn’t get to his because if he let go of the artery, he would bleed out.
“Ron, I need a tourniquet!”
Shurer, working on Behr, looked up at Ford. The medic was covered in blood and seemed overwhelmed by the carnage around him. Ford had watched him try and patch up his teammates for the past several hours, but the constant crack of rounds nearby and now more and more wounded stacking up had finally taken a toll.
“I need to regain my composure,” Shurer said.
Ford immediately forgot about the burning pain in his arm. He forgot about his family. He forgot about everything. Regain his composure? All Ford was seeing was red.
“I will throw you off this fucking mountain.”
But Shurer had been hit by the same bullet that passed through Ford’s arm. It ricocheted, striking Shurer in the helmet. Shaking it off, he finally scrambled out and slid the black tourniquet over Ford’s shoulder, cinching it tight with the Velcro band. Spinning the windlass rod, Ford could feel the pressure as the tourniquet slowed and then stopped the blood flow.
But the pressure quickly built up and Ford’s arm started to hurt. The tourniquet’s band was also crushing nerves in his shoulder. Getting shot was nothing compared to how his arm hurt with the tourniquet. It sent pain shooting throughout his body.
Struggling to the edge of the rocks, Ford was going to lead the evacuation. First, he had to climb down and help secure the shed in the wadi to use as a casualty collection point. Then he would give the orders to bring the men down. He was taking Williams with him. Ford had told him to grab a couple squads of commandos and set up along the two ledges to help move the casualties down.
Ford sat down at the edge and pushed off with his good arm, sliding down the rocks toward the wadi. The descent was grueling. It was hard enough for someone in top physical shape to scale down the steep rocks. But Ford only had one good arm—and he knew the insurgents would have him in their crosshairs.
He had to take it slow. One step at a time. And when the space between the ledges was too wide, he would drop down and hope he didn’t tumble off the mountain. As Ford moved, several rounds hit nearby. Soon several enemy fighters above him started taking shots at him as he slid down the mountain. He had to stop on several of the ledges and hug the rock face to avoid being hit again.
As he crawled down, Ford tried to keep his arm close to his body and out of the dirt, but after a few minutes he just let it hang. His torn triceps, exposed and hanging from his arm, dragged in the dirt and rocks. Each time he slid down the mountain, soil packed into the meat of his triceps. He didn’t care. He figured the arm was gone anyway. The only thing that mattered was making it to the bottom.